Proliferation of video content on the Internet has driven the need for reliable and efficient identification of video content. For example, proper identification of videos may be useful in the area of anti-piracy (e.g., tracking the distribution and use of unauthorized videos) to identify duplicate or near-duplicate videos, or portions of videos. Proper identification may also be useful in areas of analytics to determine video viewing tendencies (e.g., how many times the video was played, where the video was played, when the video was played, etc.). To this end, video fingerprinting has emerged as one viable technology for identifying and comparing videos.
Video fingerprinting refers to a technique of uniquely identifying videos based on various features of the videos. Unlike watermarking, video fingerprinting does not rely on any additions or changes to the video. A video fingerprint (also commonly referred to as a “video signature”) is a compact representation of the features of a video that can be used to distinguish the video from perceptually different videos. As such, a video fingerprint should ideally possess certain properties. For example, a video fingerprint should be robust in that a fingerprint extracted from a degraded video should be similar to the fingerprint of the original video. Similarly, a video fingerprint should be reliable in that two videos that are perceptually different should have different fingerprints. A video fingerprint should also be efficient in that a fingerprint should be suitable for fast and reliable database search. Unfortunately, there is a lack of video fingerprinting solutions that possess these properties.